Posted
by
Zonk
on Sunday October 22, 2006 @05:23AM
from the for-real dept.

EGM's Seanbaby has a 'director's cut' of a list of the top 20 worst videogames, a list published in the 150th issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly earlier this year. While some top lists may claim authority, this one is the real deal: these games are utter crap. From the article: "#10: Revolution X (SNES) This game is biblically horrific. You're overthrowing an oppressive world order. With Aerosmith. And music is your weapon. That scream of terror you just heard was probably you. Using your weapon, music, you'll fight a massive army of soldiers sent by the government to keep you from rocking. And since the artists were lazy, the army is made up entirely of a man in a yellow jacket and his several thousand identical twins."

There's also "J-Space for Windows". The only instance I heard about it was in a small book listing cheats for ~101 PC games in circulation at the time.

The tip for that game was don't buy it, since it got 4% -- PC Format's lowest ever rating. Other than that single comment, it seems as if the game disappeared from the face of the Earth. I have no idea why it was bad, since that comment didn't really cite when it was reviewed.

I used to be a part time reviewer, and I got sent a game that was so appalling I've never seen anything so bad since - it had jerky 2d motion and after I basically gave up on it found out that there was no quit - the only way to exit the game was to pull the power switch!

Damned if I can remember its name.. I've blocked it out. Gave it a negative percentage at the time...

Was the game 'Trantor'? Picked it up from the $5 bin years ago, it came in a big box that was empty except for a naked 5.25" floppy that wasn't even in a sleeve. Impossibly difficult to survive for more than about 30 seconds, as I recall it didn't have a 'quit' option.

OTOH, my nomination "most awesome game ever" goes to Desert Bus [wikipedia.org] from Penn and Teller's Smoke and Mirrors game package (it never made it big, surprisingly). The game was an answer to the Jack Thompson-types. Quoting from various sources [gamesetwatch.com]:

'Desert Bus' was a game we thought would really appeal to people who didn't like unrealistic games, and didn't like violence in their games. It was just like real, loving life.

The objective of the game is to drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada in real time at a maximum speed of 45mph, a feat that would take the player 8 hours of continuous play to complete, as the game cannot be paused.

The bus contains no passengers, and there is no scenery or other cars on the road. The bus veers to the right slightly; as a result, it's impossible to tape down a button to go do something else and have the game end properly. If the bus veers off the road it will stall and be towed back to Tucson, also in real time. If the player makes it to Las Vegas, they will score exactly one point: the counter - which was five zeros - went to 1.

The objective of the game is to drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada in real time at a maximum speed of 45mph, a feat that would take the player 8 hours of continuous play to complete, as the game cannot be paused.

It might be a rip-off, or it might be a zeitgeist, but "Journey to Alpha Centauri" as described by Terry Pratchett in the 1992 book "Only you can save mankind" is quite similar:

'Wobbler had written an actual computer game like this once. It was called "Journey to Alpha Centauri".

Another possible missing game is Extreme PaintBrawl [ign.com]; as far as I know, it got the lowest rating [ign.com] ever on IGN in 1998 (0.7 out of 10) and since then has never been topped (uhm, "topped" doesn't seem the right word for such games...).

A friend of mine was a developer on that title. He said they just ran out of time and money and no one wanted to finish it. No one works for free I guess, and it's not the kind of title you'd be so proud of you'd be willing to make some sacrifices.

I remember a game review from the Finnish Pelit magazine, many, many years ago. They had a section with very short reviews of games (I think they were mainly Amiga games, since Amiga was starting to get phased out by then), and some low scoring game was simply reviewed with "a shit game." That was it. It must have been really shit, I imagine.

I am deeply disappointed that Elite's landmark "911TS" did not make this list. For a review, see the last piece on this page [f9.co.uk], with accompanying glorious screenshot.
I'd be interested to learn of a less innovative game.

Well, there was always Shanghai Karate which did what Way of the Exploding Fist, Way of the Tiger, etc. had done, just much, much worse.Worst game I can remember playing though was Grid Iron [worldofspectrum.org]. The thing that isn't even mentioned in that review is how buggy the whole thing was (presumably they didn't play it long enough to notice). You'd start off playing as the Chicago Bears and 10 games down the line you were coaching the Chicano Berts. Oh, and since it can be difficult to remember what were good or bad g

WHOA! Ook now that's going to far, Custer's Revenge actually was a good game, if only for the hot indian princess sex action reward!

Can anyone think of any console game where you get to have sex with a Indian Princess after rescuing her? Anyone? How about getting to have sex with any hot girl after rescuing her?

You have no idea how disappointing super mario brothers was after seeing Custer's Revenge. Race across one screen in Custer's Revenge and you get laid, play 9 levels in SMB and you still don't get any princess sex!

Girlfriend walks in while i'm reading the review and says "Custer's Revenge. I've played that, you get to rape indian women and shit. That's a f**ked up little game." I couldn't have said it better myself;-)

Diakatana isn't THAT bad a game. Honestly, I've played much worse than just didn't happen to get the publicity... even picking a FPS that came out around the same time, IronStorm (I think was the name) was a total piece of crap. If you expand to RPGs, "Wizards and Warriors" came out in like 2001 without the capability of running in Windows 2000 and no 3D acceleration support at all. (And yes, it was a 3D game.) It was also buggy as crap... I think I got about halfway through before getting stopped by a

Finally, an article on/. about a list of worst games, instead of the usual rehash of the "Top 5/10/20 best games of all time, etc ad nauseum" lists.

Hmmm. Nobody seemed to mention Ultima IX, a terribly bug-ridden game. From the README file alone: "Be certain you empty your Recycle Bin before installing the game." Or : "We recommend that you not save the game while you're poisoned; this has been somewhat problematic in the current version."

Wow, why didn't anyone mention that?

(Another game worth mentioning: Conquest Earth. Its not buggy but... hey, might as well have been.)

Well, because there's hundreds if not thousands of games worse than Ultima IX. "Worst game" is silly because the worst games simply wouldn't spread very far - I haven't played a single game on their "bottom 20" list. What they're looking for is really "High-profile games that flopped miserably".

It's sort of the same as "best game" categories, I would place classics as "Dune 2" and "Civilization" on

This is why I wish there was some kind of moderation that all users could do on stories published here. Not digg style (ugg... don't get me started...) but a way for users to tell the editors here that the story sucked and was a waste of time. I am amazed at some of garbage that has made the front page over the last month. It WAS getting better here, but now I wonder.Something being "interesting" to one of the editors here is not the same as it being "news". I don't come here to read old, rehashed garba

Tagging sometimes seems to work well--I often see 'troll', 'flamebait', 'slashvertizement'(God, I hate that word but it seems to be occurring less frequently, thank God), 'dupe', 'pigpile'(Roland), etc. on articles.

Tags are ok, but I don't really see the point. If you put "dupe" and I put "duped", it is two different tags. I would prefer to see a list that we could choose from instead. Yes, it would be subject to manipulation if everyone could use it, but maybe only allowing those who have chosen to moderate and DO moderate would help. If someone was denied moderation in the future because their moderations were metamodded as unfair, then they would loose the ability to mod the articles.What you DO with the modera

Now c'mon, Ultima IX is hardly even in the running for "worst." Yeah, it was among the buggiest commercial releases ever; I'm not going to argue with that. But underneath the bugs, it was a damn fun game. Very similar to Daggerfall, really, in that you'd learn to love it if you could learn to ignore the technical flaws. Of course, ignoring the flaws was a rather Herculean task, in Ultima IX's case, but that doesn't make it one of the worst games ever. Most disappointing, perhaps. Best game ever to be

In defense (sortof) of BattleCruiser 3000, it seemed to be developped by a lone maniac with a fairly strong following and appeared to be fairly innovative since it covered all the aspects of futuristic combat, from space to ground.OTOH, it did too much, didn't do it very well and I have to admit I never really managed to play it. However I would give it some points for the sheer magnitude of the effort. It was an impressive piece of work. Kind of unuseable but still impressive. Which is why I wouldn't put i

You're in luck. Derek Smart (the lone maniac developer) has released the old versions of the game for free on the game's Web page [3000ad.com]. A while back I downloaded BattleCruiser Millenium, the 2nd generation of the title. [BattleCruiser 3000 was the 1st.] I have to admit, it is impressive. The scope of the idea of the game: space cruiser combat, space fighter combat, and (FPS) ground combat is very ambitious. Unfortunately the gameplay is not very good and

Well, when I say I never really managed to play it, it's because I actually bought the thing in a store but never got around to learn the 4 329 656 230 commands, deal with the numerous crashes, with the rather odd developper and his cultists on the support forums. So while I did get a glimpse of the game, I never got around to actually play it (in other words, I chickened out).I had more or less the same problems with a super realistic tank simulator (can't remember the name) a few years ago. I couldn't fig

This list is like 6 years old. I don't think Seanbaby's even touched his website in 4 years or so. It predates Battlecruiser 3000. (From what I understand, the game wasn't THAT bad, it just had terrible controls that couldn't be configured.)

What Akira from the Amiga isn't on that list? It got horrible reviews. One of my personal hated games is Red Faction 2. The first was a great game but 2 was a total let down. What were they thinking by leaving out network play?

Personally, I liked Red Faction 2 more than the first one cause it was pure arcade shooting. What I couldn't fathom though, was the fact that the 'multiplayer' in the PC version was you versus bots, there was NO network/internet connection options to play with another RL player.

At least according to a race sim maniac like me, "Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing" would be a good candidate for a more up to date version of the worst games ever list. Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] has some nice words about this quite extraordinary game.

Yeah, it seems that the reviewer's biggotry had a lot more to do with this being a "bad" game than anything else.Then again, if I play another adventure game that starts with "First, the Democrats take over the world, then the aliens come and the world lives in Star Trek like heaven until someone screws it up" (Journeyman Project) or "once religion is elimnated we make real progress - you know, until the aliens come and screw it up" (Homeworld back story in manual). Gameplay-wise, excellent games, but mayb

Especially because it really wasn't a bad game by NES standards. I played that game a lot as a kid, and it was a lot of fun. We weren't even Christian growing up -- I got it as a gift from a Christian uncle.
I didn't play the David & Goliath mini-game as much as the Noah's Ark one... but it was fairly challenging, had a whole bunch of levels, and decent replay value.
Oh well. If you read the rest of his "reviews" (see the CDI Zelda one), you'll see this was just some idiot 16 year old.

This list is one the worst I've read. The author just lists games out of his ass, and he is not even coherent with his previous list about "Worst 20 NES videogames", so you find that some NES videogames that scored less on that list scored more on this, and the supposedly worst (Deadly Towers) is missing on this list. What the...?

He said in the introduction that for this list, the magazine actually sent him the consoles to play these games - that's why there are so many Jaguar games. Obviously it is not scientific or anything, as he even admits later to forgetting to include a game. It's just a funny article - don't take it too seriously:)

That was an awesome video, I never thought they'd find the cartridges so easily.

Actually the carts were supposedly crushed by bulldozers and buried in cement. So far as I know, nobody has ever tried to find and dig up the actual burial site. The 2600 Forum at Atariage.com has an infamous thread on the subject.

This list has been rather arbitrary, however the "official" list [wikipedia.org] can be found and edited on Wikipedia.

I agree on #1 though. I cannot forget how much ET sucked (and I was a little tyke around this time). I had JUST gotten exposed to the 2600 and the crappy Pac-Mac clone released for it when the console abruptly was shoved into the closet never to see the light of day again.

I did enjoy the Atari 400 my mother had bought for my older sibling. We would both play Zaxxon for hours on it, which required starting a rather chunky and heavy cassette tape machine which you connected to the 400. There was some cheesy elevator music with some marketing propoganda (you had to turn the volumn down to ignore it). After going to get a soda and cigarettes at the store for my brother, the game would be completely loaded into RAM and we'd spend a good part of the afternoon trying to top scores.

ET however managed to suck the life out of Atari and it destroyed the company. Had it not done that, NES would have had no void to fill.

In fact, the Atari caused so much damage to the video game market (and all the other cheap video game systems), that Nintendo had to market the first 8-bit consoles by showing only the Nintendo R.O.B. (remember that thing?) The ROB had a major suck factor, but it was such a cool gimmick that the "seperate console" it needed to play the game managed to suck in enough kids that eventually the ROB was discarded (within about 6 months after it released).

The ROB gimmick was quickly removed from the marketplace and the only boxes you could find where the standard console and the one with the Duck Hunt gun. The original issue had everything--the NES, the ROB and the gun with all those games! What a steal!

I agree on #1 though. I cannot forget how much ET sucked (and I was a little tyke around this time). I had JUST gotten exposed to the 2600 and the crappy Pac-Mac clone released for it when the console abruptly was shoved into the closet never to see the light of day again.

I don't know why everyone hates E.T. much. I still dig it out from time to time to have ET put the transmitter together and phone home. People hate the pits... Here's a pointer for you, stay away from them! It's not like ET has any control issues, just keep him away from the pits.

E.T. follows the movie pretty well given the limitations of the 2600. You have ET, you have Elliot, and you have the bad guys trying to get ET.

Karma bedamned, I have to kinda agree. I had E.T. and it wasn't that bad. I laugh every time I see people bashing it, and there's certainly good reason to do so, like how Atari made more cartridges than there were 2600 units in homes, because the game would be so awesome as to require people to buy consoles to have the game.

Everyone always talks about the pits, but I never really had a problem getting out of them. I wonder what kind of awesome skills I might have repressed inside me for playing UT if I had

Bad Street Brawler was published on at least the C64 under another name (that I can't think of now to save my life), and I thought that it was a pretty funny game if not a particularly good one. However it seems that besides the name change the game was also sanitized for the NES - the midget strongmen were handbag-wielding grannies in the (original?) computer version. I've never played the NES version and it's been ages since I played the C64 version, but does anyone know if there were other differences as

Replying to myself here, but the name I was looking for was "Street Hassle" (apparently also released as "Bop'n'Rumble" in the U.S.). Looking at the screenshots [mobygames.com] it seems the NES version also replaced the blind, stick-wielding old guys with baseball-bat wielding hooligans. Removing the game's over-the-top humour really robs the NES version of its only saving grace so it's no wonder it is so poorly rated.

I nominate this for a pretty high ranking in the Worst Websites Outside Of Myspace list. Seriously, I had to turn off the CSS to avoid eyebleed and my system is already blocking GIFs and Flash, I don't even want to know what this would look like to some poor IE user.

The worst game I ever purchased was "Airport Tycoon". Talk about abysmal. The concept had so much promise, but the result was so buggy and unfinsihed and ugly and unplayable, that it's the only game I ever uninstalled completely after less than one day, and then shredded and destroyed rather than taking it back for a refund. The only pleasure I got was destroying that piece of crap game.

Examples of what was wrong: all the graphical colors were muddy earth tones, just ugly. Placing buildings was buggy as hell (many times a building, road, or runway would refuse to be placed, for no apparent reason). Placing things inside the terminal (like ticket counters and security) was pointless... you could pile everything up on top of each other so people couldn't possible reach them, and it didn't matter. All that mattered is that you placed them somewhere. Also, what happened on the screen showed ZERO relationship with what was going on in the game. The game would say that the runway was too crowded, but the display would show an empty runway.

I was enjoying this article until I got to the review of Zelda: Wand of Gamelon [seanbaby.com]. At first, I thought he was committing the sin of just being a jackass and using "gay" as a term to mean lame, but not actually connecting it with homosexuality, then I read "Now do the math on this: experts in ass ramming estimate that about 10% of the world is homosexual, and if you consider that only 5 people actually wanted a CDI machine, that means that this game was made specifically for a target audience of one half a person."

"Experts in ass ramming" eh?

Sounds like this guy has got a problem, oh I figured it out, he's a fucking idiot.

I've been playing games for 30 years, it is most definitely the worst I have played. I'm not talking about other platforms, just the DS version. It's a game with so many bugs that it should be retitled "Get to the end of the level while working round the bugs". It could have been called "Defeat the Empire while working round the bugs" except that I'm not sure that the goal is to defeat the Empire. On some levels the goal appears to be merely to run around until the level suddenly disappears and is replaced

This is the most pathetic article I have ever read. Other than being horribly offended by the language of the article, it read mostly like it was written by some teenage kid on his blog. While I must agree with his game picks, I feel that he was overly harsh in many areas, especially graphics. The Kriss Kross game and the Zelda game made early use of video compression capabilities, and especially with the Kriss Kross game, the idea that you are mixing videos, real-time, on the fly, on hardware the likes of the Sega CD, limited to 64 colors being able to be displayed at one time, was quite a technological marvel. Several of the games he mentioned had sucky graphics not because of poor design, but because of limitations of the NES and the Gameboy color. Actually, from the screenshots he posted of stuff like Bubsy, Kriss Kross, Barensteen Bears, Total Recal, and so forth, the graphics were on par with other games of the same genera on the same platform. Shoot, even ET, with as AWFUL as that game was, had graphics that were on par with other Atari 2600 titles.

While I must admit that all of these games sucked, the reasons given in the article were not good. It looks like games were picked at random, I mean, with the exception of ET, I can think of many other games that should be on this list instead. I would much rather be forced to play Bubsy than that horrible Home Alone game for the SNES, Galaga 13 and Michael Jackson's Moonwalker could be put in the same category as Total Recal, and I cannot believe that not a single Barbie game made the list. And what about those games that were released that were so buggy that they could not be played? Three Dirty Drarfs for the Sega Saturn actually CRASHED on me every time I get to a certain point of the game, which, I have not played it in years, so cannot remember if its the first or second level, but made the game practically worthless. I have played racing games where physics seemed to be a concept the game designers left out, making it perfectly alright to drive through solid objects. How in the world did Aquaman not get on this list?

Once again, I must admit that all these games suck, but if you are going to work for EGM, stop acting like a 14 year old who is having a tempertantherum because he just got grounded.

Heroes of the Lance was bad enough to be on the list? It wasn't great, but it wasn't that bad either. Oh, I just read the article, and he's talking about the NES version. The PC version was decent at least. The NES version looks like crap compared to the PC version (EGA baby!).

Entertain? It was non-informative and insulting - All it contained beyond the list was 'this game sucks, the gameplay sucks and the graphics suck' without backing it up with anything besides the most rudimentary details.

With this new slashdot moderation system, how do I mark this entire article as "-1, dumb"??

Well in my case, it provided a lot of closure. I always felt like a retard when I tried to play that ET game. I'd sit awake in my room at night figuring, "OK" I just need to be smarter or pay more attention. I can't believe a video game on the atari would be wrong or bad, so it must be me!!"

When I saw the article title, I thought, "Oh please God, let it be on the list. Anywhere on the list!" Number One... There is a God.

Good way to get some karma, but the point of the article is that it's funny to read. The list is totally not interesing, as the games were chosen and ordered apparently randomly (you could say they're just 20 terrible games of probably a thousand terrible games).

You forgot Happy Fun Time Cheesegrater Testicle Assault, from Namco for the Atari, voted the most painful game of all time.

For obvious reasons, I believe no one ever got to the final level, which involved Mexican hot peppers and flesh-eating wolverines. Ahh, let's not go there after all. Those wacky Japanese game geniuses.

I have have always said that a good game to some may be a crap game to another and vice versa. To really rate games you need to stick to groups (ie. FPS, RPG, platformer, adventure.... etc) and if the game is for the PC and/or console and not try to lump them all into one heap. Of course you end up with a book instead of a few pages and even then some people will disagree with you.

Like it or not sales can help better than someones comments, however when you are first or near first to market (I think "Night Trap" falls into this) then people will buy it even though they find out later it stinks and the company cries all the way to the bank. When this game came out the Internet was young and not many people had access to it so the only ratings for a game was to ask the retailer and you can imagine what they would say or wait till the monthly gaming magazine came out (assuming it rated the game). This does not happen as much now although for any purchase it still is "Caveat Emptor" (Latin for "Buyer Beware").

Still the article was light reading and was fairly humorous in its descriptions (condemnations) of the games.

If there is some minimum bar, or aggravating factor for getting position on lists such as this then I would include such things as "hype" and number of sales. Since Since John Romero's Daikatana didn't make the list I have to assume that hype was left out, but the fact that E.T. came out number one on his list suggests that sales figured in his calculations. E.T. was actually investigated by a television news team for being so terribly awful. Its creator was interviewed and shrugged it off on camera, say

For those of you at work today, you might want to skip this one. Unless, of course, you don't mind your boss seeing the triple-breasted martian prostitute. Hell, it might make for interesting conversation during your annual review.

In contrast, the review of Neverend at Just Adventure's website http://www.justadventure.com/reviews/Neverend/Neve rend.shtm [justadventure.com] rates it as an A-. I think many of the Gamespot reviewers are given games to review in genres that they don't like and it is hard to write an objective review. Gamespot in particular always seems to give adventure games a bad review with only 2 games in the genre getting a rating over 8 in the past few years, and not since Syberia in 2002 has there been a rating over 9.

And, having played Syberia, I can honestly say that as an adventure game it sucks donkeyballs. All puzzles are incredibly easy, except for one which is completely undoable. In itself this is not enough to invalidate the game, but the puzzles are virtually all ridiculously illogical. I mean, at one point in the game the main character cannot climb a certain ladder because there are birds sitting in front of it, and "she is afraid of birds". Now,